Forbidden Palace

[Theseus]

Oh, and btw, FP+SPHQ+Courts+Police Stations is friggin' bloody fantastic!! I'm playing the end of AU 505, and my empire is rocking!

[Arrian]

2-3 towns away from the palace city is my approach if I'm building it straight-up.

If I get lucky with an early MGL, it might be a tad farther away. But even so, not much farther.

There is one more thing about the FP that I take into account now more than I did pre-Conquests:

They city it's actually placed in. In vanilla or PTW, I chose the city for the FP primarily based on its location (central to a portion of my empire), not the particular city. However, witht the FP's empire-wide effect now smaller, the boost it gives to its host city is *relatively* more important. Therefore, I tend to try and pick a city that has true monster production/commerce potential. If that means having the FP a tad off-center, so be it.

-Arrian

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Lul Thyme

Imagine 32 cities with 1 shield producting items of variable shield (say cost from 50 to 100).
Then an increase of one shield in each, will double their production (so the production of the whole 32 cities) and will waste only 1 shield per thing build half the time (when the cost is odd).

Imagine 1 city with x production building items of variable shield, and it gets an increase of 32 shields, of those 32 shields on average, a lot more than 1/2 per item will be wasted....

So assuming both cases were building as fast (say the one city was building one item every x turn, and the 32 cities were building each every 32x turn) then ON AVERAGE, the 32 cities will be building faster than the one city after the 32 shield boost.

I know this is a slight threadjack, but vxma (who I think has great ideas, btw) was basically wrong in his statement that an fixed increase of shield in one city increases more production than distributed over a lot of cities.


If you still dont understand, I can give the general formulae for the probability of wasting shields and the proof..., or you can try building an example (dont forget I said on AVERAGE, so try to build a typical example, just random numbers) to convince yourself...

Sorry I missed this thread some how and did not reply. I think what is being lost here we were (I was) talking about sid games. I already said I don't care what you do at emperor or lower, you can't lose.

My 32 cities are mostly of no interest to me, except for the added unit support they provide. I am only going to get good production out of the core cities and the FP city.

The FP city may not even be strong enough soon enough to do a great deal of good. I am in a war of attrition and I only want troops and transports. I may put the FP down as a prophylactic to a culture flip and nothing else.

Any 1 shield city is not going to build a dam thing for me. I am going to have to kill about 800 to 1200 troops (per civ), all I care about is what cities can crank out the best unit in a reasonable amount of time.

No way am I going to have a 1 shield city working on a 50 or a 100 shield build of any kind. I would prefer they chip in gold and be on wealth.

I am not arguing that in some abstract situation your method will not yield more, I am saying I will be dead with that concept.

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Theseus
vmxa1, I think you might be missing something useful: The benefit in usable shield production is NOT spread around across the empire... it will tend to show up in crap cities as +1, but in larger cities that have significant shield production but high waste, you may get as many as 5 or more shields per turn 'back', which can often be more than enough to shave turns off of unit builds.

Can we say 28spt -> 30spt? Or even better, 28spt -> 34spt?

T that is my point. I don't care about any cities, except the high producting ones. So the question for me is how many cities will get enough shields to be of signficant use?

So far I have not found the FP to do much for more than three cities. Now that could be my fault. I may not have found a placement that is optimal, but often the FP city itself is not all that great.

I tend to shy away from using a core city for the FP, as I need those cities to keep producing, not shift to an FP build. Again that may be an error.

[Theseus]

Combining my point (better cities get more of an effect) and Arrian's (making the FP city itself a shield monster)... you may want to try it from that perspective, v.

[Terra Nullius]

well, i'm still curious v

aren't you just using commercial trait to buy your way out of fp trouble?

let's say, in terms of empire wide savings
commercial = 5% improvement
fp = 10% improvement

then commercial + fp = 15% improvement

if the 5% benefit you get from being commercial is enough to run the empire. it makes sense to economise by ditching the fp

would you play the same given a non-commercial civ?

obviously, we have very different modes of play
(couldn't give a rat's about sid, don't have time for large maps and commercial civs all smell like fish to me)
but i'm really curious to know what your fp decision tree looks like

for me it comes up as one of the necessary things i must get done, generally before gunpowder
like i said earlier, my early-ish wars are generally fought on the basis solely of establishing a good fp site
only in exceptional cases would i fail to have it built asap

[vmxa1]

I don't know anything about this 10% improvement for the FP in C3C. I don't care about macro or empire wide savings.

What I know is that when I drop an FP down and look at the cities next to the FP, I do not see much of a boost. I see nothing for cities not near the FP. So I do not care about what it does empire wide, I want a boost that I can see and use.

I have to build the FP the hard way, so it probably will take a while. That means no core city to me. I do not want to lose that city for 20 or more turns.

So a city that will maybe take 50 turns is used. It is likely pick more for its current nearness to another civ than anything else. The 50 turn city is not much of a lose at that time and when it is done, it will be built up enough to be useful.

Remember I am facing a civ that will surely have a lot more culture than I do.

I probably will not have a leader to rush it as the FP seems to be available right after I have had my first war and the next one is not close at hand. Chances are would make an army anyway as it is more useful to me than the FP.

If I made a leader, I am at war and can do alot more damage with another army, especially as I want to get my first 3 asap.

Yes I would play the same without the commercial trait. I would only change if I played at Demi as that is a level that I have a shot at the tech lead. I do not have to be aggressive and conquer to survive. I will not be in a big culture hole.

But maybe I am confused as I am going to have an FP at some point so it is not like I do not get the boost. So all we are really talking about is how important it is to place it and how soon.

I maintain it is not worth making it top priority and the location is not life or death in the game I am talking about. I am not even convinced it it a huge deal in any game, but I am willing to listen.

[Terra Nullius]

Originally posted by vmxa1
I don't know anything about this 10% improvement for the FP in C3C.

probably alexman's c3c corruption thread
i'll see if i can chase it down

it was the figure for a particular eg
different games would give different figures, but its' a decent place to start for a benchmark

the 15% for comm +fp is my extrapolation but there's no reason for it to be far out

What I know is that when I drop an FP down and look at the cities next to the FP, I do not see much of a boost.

i'll have to test out some commercials - see if i get the same results

I maintain it is not worth making it top priority and the location is not life or death in the game I am talking about.

seems to be the concensus

i'm still pretty sold on the fp as an idea
it introduces one extra strategic consideration to the layout of the whole empire
- that's been tamed in c3c

incidentally, i still don't see why there should be such a difference in c3c - from what i could absorb of the maths before my brain fried (see alexman - All you ever... )
there doesn't seem to be a big difference in the actual equations
certain thresholds are lower - courthouse and police stn behave differently
otherwise, corruption and waste values seem to be calculated in much the same way

save me ... a'man

[vmxa1]

The big thing is they tried to nuke the ring effect of the FP in C3C. Then the patches attempted to correct for it a bit. But the net effect is the FP can no longer give you another core as it can in CivIII and PTW.

I don't think anyone would disagree that in PTW or CivIII you need to take great care with FP placement and the sooner the better. Often you would see people put it down near the capitol with the intent of jumping the palace somewhere farther out or use a leader to rush a new palace.

This was very powerful, but it is not in C3C. You could slam either the FP or a new palace on another contient and be fat like a rat, essentially having two cores, those days are gone.

[Terra Nullius]

those were the days ...

oh yes, those were the days

[Terra Nullius]

ok finally i get it

the basic difference between van/ptw and c3c is that fp placement has no effect on city rank in c3c

in vanilla cities surrounding the fp suddenly got promoted in rank - leading to a big decrease in their corruption due to city rank
in c3c city rankings remain exactly the same after building fp

since ocn is increased by building fp, a few cities will become more productive. these will probably be the ones just beyond the basic "core." basically, the improvement only affects cities which have a relatively low rank to begin with, and the improvement is proportional only to distance from the palace

distance of a given city from the fp will have no effect on it's corruption levels, except as far as reducing the effect of corruption due to distance (generally negligible)

this suggests that the only way to get a benefit from fp location is by placing it amongst a group of cities which have relatively high corruption due to distance, but relatively low corruption due to city rank

since high distance / low rank corruption hardly ever happens, at best we're probably looking at a smallish band of territory on the outer edge of the existing (pre-fp) core as being the most optimal location

the overall effect should be one of slightly increasing the size of the palace core rather than creating a second ring of ... well ... lebensraum

why firaxis ???
why ???

[Theseus]

There was something called Ring City Placement that exploited the distance corruption rules... this change was primarily their effort to fix it. Believe me, there was one heckuva brouhaha about it at the time (including a series of messed up patches). The final result is... ok.

[vmxa1]

I think they just saw the old ring as too powerful for the human. The AI did not take advanage of it.

[Terra Nullius]

brouha wha...?

Originally posted by Theseus
heckuva brouhaha

n they say you folks ain't bin proply edumacated ...

it also kills the exploit of jumping your palace to the moon so that all cities are closer to the fp than to the palace and they all get rank = 1

fine by me there, i think that exploit was just silly

[Terra Nullius]

Originally posted by vmxa1
I probably will not have a leader to rush it as the FP seems to be available right after I have had my first war and the next one is not close at hand.

this is the bit that really interests me

i often find myself in exactly the same spot - even given our very different in-game situations
i'm even less likely to build an army in ancient times c3c.
in c3/ptw that was important to me, now i really don't see the point

but, timing things so that i
..i) have the land available to build on
.ii) am able to build fp
iii) have the opportunity to build it
this stuff keeps me awake at nights (ok that, and the time-&-a-half shift penalties)

since i've been in the habit of prioritising fp, i'm normally quite happy to burn a leader on it,
but even given the lesser value of fp in c3c, the problem still arises that just when i really want to get an fp build done, i don't have the opportunity to do it

classically, i would maybe pop a leader in the first skirmishes. this guy arrives too early ie. before you have enough cities to build fp
later (mid-late ancient), i have the ability to build, but it's often not convenient/ economical to go to war over it
this leaves me having to get it done in the early middle ages, so i get locked into a war trying to clear territory for a good fp site and maybe pop another leader, even though i often don't want a war at that stage

basically i end up with a trade-off where i can't get the fp exactly where i want it or i can't get it built when i want it

hmm... come to think of it, even the timing issues are different for c3c
one of the biggest issues for me with placing fp was making sure i conquered neighbouring land early.
that gave me time to settle in and develop a good looking second core
now (c3c), fp is more likely to be in one of your own cities, so it becomes less important to get in early and re-educate the neighbours

just keeps coming back to ... don't set the whole foreign policy agenda on getting a good fp, it won't make that big a difference - all those sleepless nights ...